Recorded in 12 days over the course of 14(!) months, Alive Before Time represents a return to form for the Jason Pastras Trio after several years of no recorded output.

"Music is about creative expression, so I'm glad we were able to get this record done, and capture that," explains Jason Pastras. "Everybody in the band has a lot going on right now. Family stuff, other gigs, travel, etcetera, just made it hard to find time. But we all were really psyched to make some new sounds."

"It was so cool to get into the studio and flesh these songs out. For this record, I didn't necessarily want to just capture the songs as in a live performance. For most of them, my intention was to create a true album track that made full use of the studio so that the songs would have an identity, and the sonic ornamentation I imagined."

"While I think of myself primarily as a blues, or blues-rock musician, I accept that I'm a weird sort of a blues musician, in that I'm not a traditionalist, and I would never write a song with some constraint that it fit a mold. I write whatever I imagine, and I never worry about whether something is "blues enough", or "rock enough".

"In fact, the whole project became a kind of meditation on imagination for me. I tried to adhere to what I think of as the David Lynch method of just letting the creative mind lead me without letting reason become an unwelcome and unconstructive intermediary. If I imagined a sound, I just went with it. If I had a lyrical idea that really resonated with me, I'd use it, even if I didn't completely understand it. All of the music and the chorus lyrics of "Your Heart is a Ghost" is an example of that - everything but the verse lyrics came to me, exactly as I recorded them, while I was out on a walk.

"The title is like that, too. The phrase "Alive Before Time" was just this insistent impulse that would echo through my mind whenever I was thinking about the record in any way. I think it might be a reflection of my intuition that creativity, or the creative impulse, is somehow a fundamental force of the universe, existing before any other. Maybe it's the source of the Big Bang, and the reason human minds are still so inclined to create. Maybe that sounds crazy, but I really feel like this record is a very natural, elemental creative expression for me and the band."

"I also think it's a pretty wicked guitar record."

Alive Before Time, by The Jason Pastras Trio, is out now, wherever you stream music.